‘Ottawa’ Tim Murphy Novel Explores the Impact of AIDS on Community Through the Years
Two weeks ago at a meeting for Gays Against Guns — a New York City activist group that mobilized in response to the Orlando nightclub shooting — more than 100 concerned citizens showed up to plan future protests, among them, novelist and journalist Tim Murphy.
Gays Against Guns’ grassroots direct-action strategy brought Murphy back to the 1990s, when the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP took to the streets fighting for meaningful policy change and medical research. “It feels like an activistic-charged moment for gay people,” he says.
The LGBTQ centre where the meeting was held is the same one that Murphy uses as a location in his new novel, Christodora, which captures, over three decades, how AIDS devastated the community, and continues to act like a malevolent ghost over the families, friends and lovers of those affected by the epidemic. “It’s crazy that something I wrote about as a period thing, something lost in time that I tried to recapture, is suddenly, unexpectedly become part of my life,” Murphy says.
Christodora is the name of an apartment building in the city’s Lower East Side, where upper-middle-class artists Milly and Jared live with their adopted son Mateo, who was born to a young woman who died from AIDS. It’s also home to Hector, a burned-out activist whose personal grief manifests as a crippling drug addiction. The epic story and its broad cast of characters captures several other defining themes from Murphy’s own life: mental illness, the compulsion to create art, and how a supportive creative community can transform into family. It’s also a homage to New York and the dramatic changes that have occurred to the cityscape over the past 30 years. “The city has become this hall of ghosts and memories, and the past and present and future bleed into each other,” he says.
Murphy, who is 47 years old, wrote two novels while in his 20s, but after recovering from depression and addiction, found an outlet in journalism, mostly writing about AIDS-related issues. “At the time I thought, why keep writing fiction? It’s silly, with so many grievous things happening in the world,” he says. But by 2009, he felt a deep need to write fiction again, and to respond to the fact that, despite the introduction of life-saving drugs and attitudinal shifts, people are still dealing with lingering depression and isolation and addiction. “It felt like everyone had been through a war or tragedy and there hadn’t been much written that addressed or processed it,” he says. “It really coloured the gay world, and a generation, really.”
Many of the characters that appear in Christodora are composites of people from Murphy’s own life or who were involved in the original AIDS movement. He weaves in intensive research, including the often-overlooked fact that many women were also affected by the disease. “I think that putting it into characters and into narrative makes it vivid in a way that non-fiction can’t,” Murphy says. “This was an emotional book for me. It felt like a way of figuring out what was going on deeper in my heart.”